Erica Palou Borromeo

I know somebody who can tell on what day August 29, my birthday, or any date will land in year 2010 without looking at the calendar.

I don't think she cheats. How could she pull one on us? Aside from that it is unlikely she would be carrying a calendar in her bag, and one with a 2010 agenda at that, Erica, that's her name, is blind. It has not been made clear if she was born blind or if she steadily lost her vision through the years. The reality that she is blind has long been established in the clan nobody bothered to check anymore how she came to be.

When the question of her years is hung in the air, just how old she is remains elusive. When discovered, confusing. Erica is 24. She has the built of somebody in her 30s but her ways are characteristic of a boy in his early teens. Her mind is that of a storyteller. She is not a Benjamin Button.

The case is, it's not only Erica's vision that's impeded. She is a case of a mental condition. I haven't got the word for it -- but it shows in how she cannot fully connect herself to the rest of the world. Something more interesting and needful of her attention is happening in her world.

That's why when I challenged her to guess on which day August 29 will be in 2010, I first needed to call out her name 3x and fix her to my request and away from Lola Hermana, a character in her world who my sister and I taught she made up but later, whose existence was confirmed by Erica's yaya Alice. In the hours before I challenged her, Erica repeated the story of Lola Hermana like a broken record. She asked me a dozen times why I didn't sleep beside Lola and reprimanded me for what to her was despicable. When I reasoned out that Hermana is not my grandmother, she wouldn't take a word of it.

Another story that she put on repeat mode happened in her mother's Theresian days (in Cebu). Somebody in the family must have told Erica about it to point out where she got her easy flair for talking from. Or perhaps, it was her mother who relayed it to her in one of their few lazy Sunday afternoons together. So the story goes, in high school, Erica's mother was a usual in the nun's list of the most talkative, always eliciting from the robed teacher, "Ms. Borromeo, stop talking! You are very talkative Ms. Borromeo! Stand in front!" This story regaled Erica - the storyteller - like it was the first time she heard herself share it, and it worked her up to uninhibited laughter.

In the many hours we were in her company, when she spoke of her mother moved us the most. She speaks of her with such detachment she doesn't even know her by mama, or mommy, or mother. It's plainly Mita.

Tita Mita spent most of her life shuffling in and out of the country as a Flight Attendant at Philippines Airlines. In her last hours, it would be summed up that she spent more time looking after strangers than her own daughter. She died a few years, or months, short of a self-imposed deadline to wrap up her jet-setting life and start anew in a career that will allow her to settle down with her daughter. But cancer claimed her before she could reclaim those lost years that she should have spent with her daughter.

Now she could never.

Some sort of salvation in Erica's busy world (of Lola Hermana, etc) is that it keeps her away from awareness that she is already without mother, if the role of a mother ever registered in her world anyway. She continues to regale those within earshot (whether willing or not willing to lend an ear) with her stories and more recently with her singing. Out of the blue, she would charge into the tune of Rock-a-bye Baby with a different set of lyrics each time.

Her double case have mostly its downs. Her mental condition makes it difficult for her to sit still with braille. With it, she couldn't be trusted without her yaya Didit or yaya Alice (both have seen her since infancy). She has tantrums that she herself couldn't control.

But it also has its ups. Her condition gives her blindness vitality. She is able to see through the fixed darkness she wakes up to every morning, and seize whatever she can of the days as breathed, lived out, and seen by the people around her. With this, she is able to color her world with interesting characters and fascinating stories in a way that doesn't leave her in silence, in the corner, in obscurity. Whether fiction or real, she keeps everyone within earshot bracing for these stories.

After proposing my challenge, I readied myself to forgive in case she gets it wrong. But barely a minute passed before she answered.

"Sunday," she said, not guessed.

Correct, August 29 is a Sunday in 2010. Unlike Erica, I needed a calendar to confirm that.
~~~
May you rest in peace, tita Mita.